How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You're Going: Leading in a Liminal Season

by Susan Beaumont

you will be invited to stand firm in a disoriented state, learn from your mistakes, and lead despite your confusion.

A liminal organization needs to unlearn old behaviors, challenge the status quo, experiment, take risks, and learn. To do these things Jon will have to employ leadership skills that are different from the skill set that got him hired. Jon will need to demonstrate a leadership presence that is both deeply spiritual and organizationally savvy. He will need to tend the soul of the institution, as well as care for the souls in the institution.

passion. All truly great innovations are incubated in liminality. God’s greatest work occurs in liminal space.

Liminal seasons are not the same as seasons of intentional change management. During change management, leaders know where they stand and where they are headed. In change management, the leader must build consensus, overcome resistance, and remove obstacles that stand in the way of a desired future. During liminal seasons, our destination is not yet clear. The leader must keep the people moving forward, but the endpoint is fuzzy. Liminal seasons require us to build the bridge as we walk on it.

We are engaged in a transformation, the outcome of which is presently unknowable. The basic models and processes that define Church are being deconstructed. They are crumbling around us. Some new ways are emerging, but we do not yet know what the new world order will be, what forms of institutional church, if any, will remain. We are surrounded by prophetic voices trying to point a way forward, but it is not yet clear which pathways we should follow and which we should be wary

In the meantime, leaders must manage the anxiety related to the loss. Too much anxiety freezes people into inactivity or unleashes unmanageable levels of conflict. Not enough anxiety and people don’t feel the need to let go. The right level of anxiety invites followers to adapt, to leave the comfort of what was and enter a liminal state.

International consultants Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow call this type of work adaptive leadership. The core of adaptive leadership is regulating the pace of loss that people experience—to keep people from bumping up against their liminal tolerance limit. A leader doesn’t create or eliminate loss. Rather, he or she tries to control the pace at which people experience the loss. He or she protects people from experiencing too much of the loss at one time. In this way the organization continues its adaptive work and eventually moves toward reorientation.

The primary work in leading people through the liminal phase is to normalize the experience and to frame/define the season as acceptable and even desirable. One of the most difficult aspects of liminality is that people don’t understand it and they tend to think of it as undesirable and aberrant.

People expect to move in a straight line from the old things to the new, and the waiting and confusion feels meaningless or counter-productive. An effective leader will teach people about the importance and value of a liminal season, why they are feeling the way they are feeling, and what they can do with their anxiety.

The leader may or may not have clarity about what lies on the other side of liminality. Those being led see only the losses they are being asked to sustain. The effective leader invites the people to examine and adapt attitudes, values, assumptions, and behaviors—to understand the loss as something productive. Without letting go, the people cannot make the adaptive leap into reorientation.

Liminal seasons are thin spaces, where the presence of the divine is palpable. Liminal seasons are ripe opportunities for communities of faith to deepen their practices of group discernment, to watch for the movement of God.

Liminality also has a dangerous side. When old structures, policies, and procedures are left behind, an organization is remarkably susceptible to false leaders and prophets. Victor Turner personified this danger when he coined the term “the trickster”—dangerous figures who look like charismatic leaders but are incapable of living well in community.

One is the need to let the people do their own adaptive work. A leader cannot impose reorientation on a people not yet ready to yield.

The work of the leader then is as much about presence as it is about action. The leader provides interpretations and gives meaning to what the people are encountering, designs effective interventions that help people learn, acts politically to expand his influence base, protects and engages the voices of dissent, and orchestrates conflict to continue the hard work of adaptation.

liminal season requires a personal presence that is different from leadership during stable times. Problematically, however, many church leaders invest their energy in traditional leadership activities: vision casting, advocating for big new ideas, striving for growth, and mastering new skills. These practices may provide a false sense of control and momentum; however, they don’t fundamentally impact liminality.

In liminal seasons, traditional leadership activities are exhausting and unproductive.

Leadership in a liminal season rarely looks outstanding to the random observer. In fact, leading effectively in a liminal season is incredibly dangerous work because people are generally not happy with the individual who guides them through the hard work of loss, grief, and letting go.

Instead, we can approach this era with a different leadership stance, engaging a different body of leadership work. We can let go of our egoic need to look successful and lead instead from a place of open wonder and curiosity.

The authenticity of any leadership action depends upon the interior condition of the leader—on his or her ability to be true to self and true to the institution, to remain non-anxious, and to connect with the Divine.

When the interior condition of the leader is rooted in personal ego, the attention of the leader is inauthentic, not attuned to the needs of the organization. Instead, the ego creates an image of the leader that the self will admire, and that will garner the admiration of others.

issues through the lens of “God Consciousness.” We practice letting go of personal agendas, our own anger, fear, and judgments. In the empty space created by this release, we invite God to speak and we seek to listen. With contemplative hearts, we live openly and lead with mercy and patience. We embrace our own vulnerability and become generous toward the unsettling issues facing us in the here and now.

In a liminal season we must teach the leaders that we serve to see and sense themselves differently, to challenge their field of awareness and to discover their blind spots. We cannot invite others to this work if we ourselves operate with limited awareness.

All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered.

The shift from knowing to unknowing is an interior act of suspension. We slow down our thinking, observe our judgments, and recognize our own compulsions and ego-centric concerns.

To seek communion with God, we must relinquish our need for control and our certainty about what we know. We must yield to uncertainty.

Wonder is the ability to suspend judgment and to hold competing thoughts and values in tension. Wonder arrives when we acknowledge that experience is always larger than our ability to interpret it. We hold our interpretations more loosely and ponder the interpretations of others. In a state of wonder, we perceive the organization from its edges and boundaries, rather than from the center. We develop a rich capacity for challenging unstated assumptions and seeing things with fresh eyes.

Advocacy doesn’t serve us well when we are living with such profound disorientation. Advocacy assumes certainty about direction and clarity about outcomes.

Attending is a capacity for deep seeing and listening. It is an act of being fully present in the moment.

Until the leader sets aside his advocacy, he is not free to attend to an emerging option.

We need both organizational savvy and spiritual maturity within the leadership body. We need organizationally strong leaders with deep spiritual rootedness who are open to what might emerge from the practice of discernment.

The process of shedding is invited when we say, “What needs to die in me/us for God’s gifts and direction to find room in our lives?”

Shedding invites personal indifference. Discerners suspend personal preferences because they don’t value anything as much as they value honoring the soul of the institution and knowing God’s will.